You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

jimmy comments on Participation in the LW Community Associated with Less Bias - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: Unnamed 09 December 2012 12:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (49)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: jimmy 10 December 2012 08:34:50AM *  3 points [-]

Less bias in the sense that they can answer these kinds of questions well. I'm uncertain how well rationality in these cases correlates with what we really care about, but it is clearly not super great.

These questions test for your ability to think carefully and apply knowledge of specific biases in a situation where you're prompted to "think rationally" and are being scored for not falling for tricks. If you're stuck asking survey questions, I'd ask much more personal questions like "how smart/rational are you compared to the LW distribution" (though there are problems here too).

I've met quite a few people through LW, and some were impressively rational in a very applied-to-real-life fashion. However, there's another group of about similar size that are terribly irrational when it comes to real life - engaging in motivated cognition and blind to that fact because of motivated cognition. Yet these people would probably ace this test, since they're quite good at not being explicitly and obviously wrong (they're good at looking smart). I'd guess this is more of a strength of identity effect than a "effective in real life" effect.